I don't know why, but I keep forgetting how to log off of Windows 8 / Server 2012 systems. To do so, go to the Start "screen", click on your user account picture/name in the upper-right hand corner of the screen, and select "Sign out". Or you can ‬ select...

I created a Windows Service installer using WiX and included a custom action that called PowerShell to run a script. Unfortunately, I called the script with the wrong parameters and then the service would not uninstall. So, I tried a lot of different...

I was wondering how you change the title of the Command Prompt window. A little searching found that Scott Hanselman had answered this question here . All you have to do is type "title <your text>" and press Enter to change the title of your Command...

I ran into a problem yesterday where I couldn't use the Remote Desktop client in Windows 8 to connect to a client-side Hyper-V guest. I got the following error: Remote Desktop cannot verify the identity of the remote computer because there is a time...

Are you wondering how to best deploy files for your Visual Studio 2012 Unit Tests because the technique changed from the way you did so in Visual Studio 2010? Check out this MSDN article for all the details: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library...

I deleted two snapshots from a Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) this morning. This left the base .vhd file and two .avhd differencing disks. I decided I wanted to merge them into a single file and learned that the diskpart tool will let you do this. ...

I was considering installing the timeit.exe command on my new laptop, but read that it may not work on the latest versions of Windows. So, I found an article on StackOverflow that recommended using the Measure-Command command in PowerShell. You use it...

If you are using Team Foundation Service (i.e. in the cloud, not our on-premise Team Foundation Server ), finding the administration pages from the web site can be a bit tricky if you don't know where to look. Log into your TFS account. If you don...

I have been working more and more with PowerShell lately and I love it. If you want to watch a great introductory 75 minute video to get up to speed quickly, look no further than here: Windows PowerShell Crash Course http://channel9.msdn.com/Events...

Update : I'm told that this command-line option works in Windows 7, as well. So it's not a change for Windows 8/2012. I just didn't have a Windows 7 machine handy to test it. The command-line parameters for the Event Viewer have changed in Windows...

In the Source Control Explorer in VS2010 or VS2012, you can cloak any folder in the source tree that want to recursively excluded from "Get Latest Version" operations. Just right-click on the folder, select "Advanced" and "Cloak...". VS2010/2012 will...

When trying to map a local folder to a TFS server as a different user than the one under which I was logged in, I kept getting the message: The working folder [source path] is already in use by the workspace [workspace name];[owner] on computer [tfs...

If you need to combine text files in cmd.exe, you would issue the following command: copy file1.txt+file2.txt+file3.txt combined_files.txt If you wish to do the same for binary files, you would use the following command: copy /b file1.bin+file2.bin+file3...

I had a computer running Windows Server 8 Beta with a Storage Pool using the “Parity” resiliency type.  I installed Windows Server 2012 RTM “over it” (i.e. not an upgrade) and completely lost access to this Storage Pool when the  RTM install...

I've been using NLog for a while now and recently decided I wanted to have some of my log files written as Unicode text. I learned that you can specify this in your <target> sections of NLog.config as follows: <targets> <!-- add your...

I could not boot my laptop today because I was prompted for my BitLocker Recovery Key and did not have the associated .txt or .bek files. So, fortunately, I was able to call our helpdesk and have them provide me with the password. I could then boot my...